


Nothing

by Colubrina



Series: Rare Pair Harry Potter One Shots [15]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:33:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27617695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Colubrina/pseuds/Colubrina
Summary: James Potter wakes up in the future.  He's won, but he's also lost everything.
Series: Rare Pair Harry Potter One Shots [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1459201
Comments: 14
Kudos: 49





	Nothing

It was black at first.

James thought he was waking up, to begin with, then he had a flash of fear that he couldn’t open his eyes, that everything was dark. Injured, he thought, but no matter how he tried he couldn’t feel anything, which meant he was either very injured indeed or –

But that didn’t bear thinking about, and, besides, you couldn’t _think_ if you were dead. James hadn’t spent much of his life thinking about death other than as a thing to be devoutly avoided, but he was reasonably sure of that. A dead man didn’t waste time wondering whether he was or not. Which meant he was alive. 

Being alive became much less theoretical when his head began to pound, and he could feel his limbs, one at a time, and every one of them hurt. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so quick to reject the idea of death when the other choice seemed to mean pain that shifted from dull to sharp and pulled itself into a burning point in his chest that exploded out of him in fire and pain and –

“Hey, you’re waking up.”

It was a girl’s voice. Young woman’s? Feminine, however old she was, filled with relief. She hadn’t quite expected that, James could tell, and when he forced his eyes open into a world so bright he already missed the dark, the look on her face confirmed it. She’d thought he would die.

Well, that made two of them.

“Lily,” he tried to croak out. 

The girl looked down, and when there was no immediate reassurance something in James curdled. “Harry?” he asked in a voice that wanted to crawl back down his throat. If he didn’t ask the question, he would never hear the answer, and if he never heard the answer, maybe it wouldn’t be real.

“I don’t know a Lily,” the girl said carefully. “I found you. I shouldn’t have been in here, I know. I was exploring.” The words had the feel of a story she’d already rehearsed. James knew that cadence. _We weren’t doing anything wrong, we were just there. It just happened._ “You,” she stumbled on the word and stopped.

James tried to sit up, and when he did, the world spun and twisted, and he regretted it at once. This was his house. _His house._ That was the mantle where he and Lily had set Harry’s baby pictures. That was the chair where she’d nursed him. That was the door where –

“Where’s Voldemort?” he demanded. His hand reached for his wand and found it. It was at the girl’s throat before she could blink. “Where’s Sirius?”

She swallowed, and he could feel the bob of her throat through the wand. “Voldemort died decades ago,” she said. 

James studied her. He knew liars, and this girl could be one of them. She didn’t seem like it. She seemed like an ordinary witch, early 20s, attractive in a can’t-be-bothered sort of way. That didn’t mean anything. He wouldn’t put it past that sadistic bastard to recruit pretty little brunettes and teach them to lie and cheat to find his enemies and, God knew, he was one of Voldemort’s enemies. “Let me see your arm.”

“What?” Her fear was alchemizing to confusion, and under that was a little anger. More than a little.

“Show. Me. Your. Forearm.”

She took a slow and careful step back, then peeled her sleeves up. Unmarked skin stared back at him, and James lowered his wand.

“Tell me what happened.”

She was getting angry now, and he couldn’t blame her. Accusing someone of being a Death Eater was… it was something you didn’t do. Something he’d never done, not to anyone. “I don’t know,” she said, or rather snapped. Her words had the brisk, chopped feel of someone feeling more and more put upon the more she considered the situation. “I came into this house, you were lying there, half-dead. I tried to revive you. I did. Some thanks I got too.”

She huffed and stomped her way back toward the wreckage of his front door. 

“Wait.” James sank down, what energy he’d had gone. When she hesitated but didn’t turn around, he added, “please” and that did the trick. 

“I shouldn’t be cross,” she said in what was clearly meant to be an apology. “You’re hurt.”

“I should be dead,” he said. He put his hand out wanly. “James Potter, at your service.”

She smiled and gingerly sat down next to him on the dirty floor. “Hermione Granger.”

“Would you mind,” he felt crazy asking this, but she’d said decades earlier. _Decades_. “What year is it?”

“2003,” she said cautiously. He could see her hand steal to her wand in a movement she probably thought was stealthy. Probably would be, too, if he hadn’t lived through a war.

Died in a war?

“You said Voldemort died? How?”

“I mean, it was a long time ago,” she said, her hand still on her wand. “I might not remember the history perfectly, but he attacked some family, and they all died, but the father cursed him again and again and again. Seven unforgivable curses, they say, and they found the bodies all in a heap. The war went on a bit after that, but -- ”

“The baby?” he asked, his voice not shaking because he wasn’t going to shake. He wasn’t.

She nodded, and the sorrow in her face broke him.

James buried his face in his arms. He wanted to cry. He should cry. Crying was the right response when you found your world had ended. The tears wouldn’t come, though. He wanted to scream. He wanted to throw himself at the floor and force his way back through whatever veil had dumped him here, out of his own time, his Lily dead. His Harry gone. The tears wouldn’t come. They wouldn’t come. They wouldn’t come. “Nothing,” he whispered. “It was all for nothing.”

She put an arm around his shoulders, gingerly at first, then, when he leaned into her, with more force. And then he could cry. James Potter buried his face in this stranger’s lap and wept until the sky outside went dark, until his body was stiff in the growing cold, until he was empty and bereft. And she never left. She started to stroke his hair after a while and, when he had quieted down, she asked simply, “Do you need a place to stay. I have a spare room in my flat.”

James wanted to laugh. He was wealthy. He was the heir to a bloody fortune. He had nothing that mattered at all. “Yeah,” he said, pulling himself upright. “That would be great. Thank you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on FFN.


End file.
